


Twice More Than Thrice (And Then Some)

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Category: X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Blushing, Budding Relationship, Drinking, First Time, Flirting, Longing, M/M, Nostalgia, Softness, Teasing, and these two are idiots, everyone is a sassball, five times verse, magnetic attitude, mind powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-29
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-07-18 21:10:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7330771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> Charles’ll only take a peek, just to see if he’s wasting his time or hers. No harm in that, surely, when it could afford them both a phenomenal night together or let them separate for greener pastures.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>He nearly falls face first into the lovely breasts he is so coveting as Erik sidles up close enough to place his glass upside down to the bar.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“Another, please,” he says, tone drawled to appear much more drunk than he is. He considers ignoring Charles entirely, but where would the fun be in that? “And one for him, since he’s done.”</i>
</p>
<p>Five times Erik made Charles blush, and one time Charles did it to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Also known as this pairing hit us as hard as 00Q had, and since those two lovely gentlemen are on a well-deserved honeymoon, these two have gladly taken over.
> 
> No beta (yet), sorry guys!

It starts - oddly - in a bar.

This particular twinge of boredom, anyway. The entire escapade started in far too cold sea-water when some tiny squirming little man had clung to Erik and held him back from meeting his destiny. But that’s too long ago and too marred by better things to remember, so Erik slugs back another finger of whiskey and regards his friend at the bar.

Most of the class old enough to drink is out with them, spread across the place with smiles and tilted heads and mischievous expressions. Some stay at the table Charles had actually paid for. Erik is fairly sure they’re only here to avoid the inevitable questions later as to why they hadn’t come. He can’t blame them.

He doesn’t bother them, they don’t bother him. In fact, without exception, all the young talents that Charles has tracked down have been thoroughly worth both of their time.

Curious.

But now, Erik hardly cares for the company, he cares for the curve of a familiar bottom as Charles cocks his hip to rest it against the stool he stands beside, deliberately not sitting down.

Charles is, as often at a bar, in the process of wooing another possible talent. Or perhaps simply an extraordinarily naive girl. Erik can’t fault him for trying, and his efforts offer endless entertainment for dull evenings, or quiet games of chess to throw him off the match. Tonight, Charles is preening, arching back to present his chest and tapered pants, a thumb hooked into his belt, a grin cocked wide on his lips, hair still carefully combed back.

A nerd. Entirely, through and through, the graduate and PhD candidate that he is.

Good lord.

Erik hums into his empty glass, teeth pressed against the rim for just a moment, and pushes himself to stand and get it filled again.

“You know,” Charles says, “scientists believe that the gene for red hair could be extinct within a century.”

It doesn’t go nearly so well as he hoped. The girl looks affronted and dismissive both, snorting softly as she takes a sip of her pint. “Let me guess,” she offers. “You’d like to try and keep it going. Tonight, say, once we’ve finished our drinks.”

“The heart of a conservationist,” he answers, tilting his glass towards the pretty thing in a short mustard-yellow skirt, who’s clever enough to prove interesting beyond the blessing that genetics gave her body. “You can’t hold it against me for wanting to save the finer parts of the human race.”

This at least earns a laugh, however dry, and Charles’ smile widens. He glances briefly about himself, just to ensure that none of the students are near enough to hear this, nor to see him tuck a few fingers beneath his chin and set his fore and middle to his temple. He’ll only take a peek, just to see if he’s wasting his time or hers. No harm in that, surely, when it could afford them both a phenomenal night together or let them separate for greener pastures.

He nearly falls face first into the lovely breasts he is so coveting as Erik sidles up close enough to place his glass upside down to the bar.

“Another, please,” he says, tone drawled to appear much more drunk than he is. He considers ignoring Charles entirely, but where would the fun be in that? “And one for him, since he’s done.”

Charles’ fingers curl against his hand, the girl’s mind yet untouched. Deliberately so, Charles knows, without needing any sort of special ability to be certain that Erik has interrupted with intention. Still he smiles, warmly, a welcoming and cheery expression that betrays nothing of how acutely Charles notices how the sinews on the back of his hand stand out as he runs his thumb along the edge of his glass.

“Thank you, Erik,” he chimes, his pleasure far from forced. “Unnecessary, but very kind. We were just - ”

“Friend of yours,” she asks, brow raised.

Charles looks back at her, and for a moment considers denying their friendship entirely so that he can find himself buried face down in a mound of ginger hair before the night is out. He considers Erik again. When the thoughts merge, Charles has to force himself to breathe again.

“We’re teachers together,” he decides to say, because the truth is far more complicated.

“Studied charisma,” Erik replies, turning to regard the young woman more closely, now that he’s near enough. He’s no interest in her whatsoever, but it’s very clear that Charles does. For hardly anything more than a romp in the sheets, possibly breakfast, if he’s feeling generous and if the hangover fades. “A new branch of experimental evolutionary psychology.”

It delights Erik that Charles hasn’t even the wits to offer a proper glare. 

So he goes on, saving his friend an awkward silence.

“Professor Xavier - I’m certain he’s flashed his credentials to you intimately - is our leading researcher. Falling deep into the game himself, in order to get the most accurate results.”

The whiskey arrives. Erik sets Charles’ victoriously in his hand before slapping his shoulder. The smaller man tenses a little, though it’s hardly from displeasure. No, it’s from the way that out of sight of Charles’ quarry, Erik strokes his thumb once against Charles’ back.

If Charles didn’t know better, he’d think it possessive.

“My collaborator is being unclear,” Charles course-corrects, quickly. “We’re of course interested in the nature of charm - magnetic attraction, one might say,” he adds, with a wry glance to Erik. “What causes it. How one effects it.”

He turns back to the girl, her dry amusement evident, but it’s a far better place than he was in before. His smile is small, and despite his endeavoring and intent, entirely genuine.

“I think you’d be a perfect candidate for study.”

She grins, brow raising, and rolls her eyes a little. “You’d be better off studying your collaborator.”

“Oh, he’s tried,” Erik assures her, leaning more heavily on his friend, hand traveling lower down Charles’ back, thumb skimming his spine. “But he’s always a little too quick on the draw.”

The redhead raises a brow, flicking her eyes between the two of them as she brings her glass to her lips and takes a sip of what foul sweet concoction she’s consuming. Erik turns his head to Charles again, studying him with a squint, standing so close.

“No, he’s an exceptional researcher, but he has no idea how to take his time.”

“Erik.”

“He tangles himself in his clever words,” Erik grins, all beautiful teeth on display, and traces a knuckle against Charles’ tailbone. “When all he needs to do it just give them time to caress, and settle, and rise, like a flower from the soil.”

Charles manifests a smile, dismissive, and then a laugh, that Erik knows is a promise to get him back for this later. He reaches across himself to pat Erik’s shoulder, and shakes his head as he leans in to whisper to the girl.

“You see why he’s a poor subject,” he begins. “Delusions of grandeur.”

And it’s then that he feels his cheeks suddenly scald. A blush so bright it’s almost painful, beginning at the bridge of his nose and carrying like spilled wine across his cheeks. It gathers in his lips and pours down further still, carrying inch by inch down his throat. The girl watches, her amusement increasing far more quickly than her interest, and in the moment that Charles realizes what Erik’s done, she slips from her stool and lifts the drink she’s been bought.

“For one whose face shows the truth so easily,” she chimes, “study yourself, doctor.”

Charles makes a sound that he hopes comes across as a self-deprecating laugh, but it falls rather closer to a whine.

“Beauty has quite the effect on me, I’m afraid,” he says, words flowing as quick as he can manage them, as though they will, like hands, reach to hold the beautiful woman near. But they don’t, and all hopes of warm thighs and coarse hair against his lips and nose fall from Charles’ mind with a heavy sigh.

Behind him, Erik sets his glass down hard against the bar and sighs, and Charles doesn’t have to turn to know that he is stretching languidly to his full feline length as he preens, the bastard.

“No interest whatsoever,” Erik tells him. “Extraordinary.”

"Yes, it's a real mystery as to how a conversation going so well could suddenly turn on a dime," Charles murmurs against the edge of his pint before taking a sip.

"Is that what 'going well' looks like?"

"That's what 'you wish you knew what I'm like in bed' looks like," he accuses Erik, turning a dry look to him. His brow lifts, a challenge evident in his words. The pull of iron-rich blood into a bloom, full-body blush has eased, although the side effect of that movement that swelled a little between his legs has not given way so readily.

“You snore in bed,” Erik points out blithely, another bright smile immediately there to counter any sputtering response his friend would offer. Tacky, perhaps, on a level Erik doesn’t usually sink to, but also amusing. The evening would not have ended well had she gone home with him. One day, Charles would stop trying, maybe.

‘Til then, Erik is more than happy to be the standing support of reason and infuriation at his side.

“Care for another?” He asks, tapping the bar in want of another drink, raising his brow to Charles who stands half-hard and glowering before him. “Or should we take the kiddies home?”

Charles pulls his lips against his teeth and sighs, terse. He watches Erik as the man calmly observes the bartender, only the slight raise of his brow lingering still of his question. It isn’t fair that he can do this - not the metal manipulation, that’s a matter of luck and evolution. It isn’t fair that he can fairly embarrass Charles out of a potential conquest (who, he might add, would have had an enormously rewarding experience) and Charles still feels such a warmth spilling heat through his chest when he looks at him.

Not because Erik’s moving his blood around incongruously.

Well, alright. Not because he’s doing it using his abilities. He does it anyway, in the way he leans against the bar, and the bare suggestion of a smile nowhere but in the muscles beneath his eyes. He does it with knuckles dragged skimming down his spine.

Charles finally puffs out a breath, and plops back down to the barstool.

“One more, I think.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"And consider Professor Xavier…”_
> 
> _Charles ruffles a little, brows raised high and smile spread to an outright grin now. His title and everything._
> 
> _He braces for the worst._

The house is a blessing, really. Big enough to house their students and many more, when they invariably venture out again to find them. Spacious and well-equipped enough inside and across the grounds to allow safe and private space for the children - as Erik is fond of derisively addressing them - to learn. It is isolated and protected, gated and heavily forested.

It is also an absolute bitch when Charles needs to find someone in particular.

Although from his study he was able to pluck his way across the minds assembled across the mansion-turned-campus, he located Erik damn near to last as he sought across rooms and grounds. Of course, he’s at the far end of the house, entirely opposite Charles’ study.

Of course, Charles’ request that he come to the study instead of Charles going to him is met with the mental image of a particularly crude gesture.

_I could make you come, you know._

_In front of the students?_

Charles snorts, trying not to smile.

Fine, then. He’ll go himself.

It’s fairly quiet, in truth. Most afternoon classes are theoretically free for students to work on self directed study. Erik has a group, but his classes are rarely more than active discussion and seemingly endless sarcastic amusement for everyone involved.

Perhaps he should have made him come, after all, considering.

Charles takes the stairs at a gentle jog and catches the bannister to swing himself into the corridor he needs. He keeps a mental tab open only because he can; as much a bastard as the man can be, Erik wouldn’t ignore a request for a meeting unless something was truly hindering him in going. He can see only a cloudy miasma of nothing much at all, a semi-wall that Erik had learned to erect far too quickly for Charles’ taste. Words bubble up occasionally, ghostly images, pages in books, faces of students…

Charles doesn’t knock as he approaches the room - he needn’t, physically. He just waits, content for a moment to listen to the murmuring of voices and sporadic laughter inside.

They’ve tried to sort out how best to organize class structure. Beyond requisite studies in physics and evolutionary biology, and remedial courses appropriate for any high school for those students who were bereft, half of each alternating day is dedicated to physical and abilities training too. To separate out those sessions, they have for now settled on students whose abilities are primarily directed outward, and those that are directed inward. Of course, they’re shoddy classifications because in one sense or another, both apply to everyone, but the students have taken to it well enough.

The _Doers_ and the _Thinkers_ , they call themselves, proudly.

And Charles seems to have found a group of Erik’s doers, meeting together in their free time.

There’s a subtle thud from behind the door and the entire group bursts into laughter. Charles can imagine that although the man won’t actively make a sound of his pleasure, his lips will be spread wide in a toothy grin of appreciation for whatever just happened; wrong or right.

“Bet the thinkers can’t do that,” comes a muffled scoff. Hardly malicious, more childish pride at being able to show off abilities that only months before had been seen as curses and horrors.

“They can do far more than that,” Erik counters, his voice warm with the smile Charles had guessed at. “And more, still, if they hear you say or think them inferior. Trust me.”

Charles’ brows lift, smile widening as he folds his arms loosely and settles to the wall beside the door. Whatever was thumped against it is dragged back with a scrape too quick to be done with a physical body.

“I’m not impressed.” It’s Havoc, this time, to no one’s surprise. “I mean, maybe Mystique’s good for Halloween parties, but -”

“But when you think she’s a family member? Someone you trust,” Erik considers. “Don’t think of her as an acquaintance. Think of her as an enemy. You’d never see her coming, and you’d have no reason to suspect, unless you suspected everyone.”

“But once I did see her -”

“It would be too late. And consider Professor Xavier…”

Charles ruffles a little, brows raised high and smile spread to an outright grin now. His title and everything.

He braces for the worst.

“He’s sort of shooting himself in the foot, teaching us how to sense when he’s reading our minds,” Angel says.

“You realize how deliberately uncouth he is within your mind to allow you to sense him there,” Erik counters calmly. “He is teaching you to suspect your thoughts not as your own, he is teaching you skill to understand when someone is manipulating you in such a way. Were he to try? Were he to use his power to infiltrate past all of your lacklustre defences, Ms. Salvadore...” Another guffaw from the class, a shift where Erik sits to suggest a motion forward, leaning in, perhaps, elbows to his knees and hands clasped between.

“Of all of us, the Professor is the most dangerous, and thus the most benevolent with his power. Do not underestimate him, having seen him in the halls and relaxing in the gardens.”

Charles tilts his head, nose wrinkling a little until he reaches up to rub the tingle of amusement away. Calling him formidable isn’t exactly a… well, it’s not the sort of compliment that usually gets one’s motor going, but from Erik, it’s both incredibly kind and wholly unexpected. Unexpected because it’s so kind, really. His intention behind it is genuine, an admiration that Charles finds curiously touching.

Erik doesn’t like anything, most days. He certainly doesn’t care for most people. And their friendship is tempered by this distance, despite reactive moments when their elements collide in conversation or camaraderie, creating light and heat.

Charles feels it now, the fusion taking place that makes his blood rush a little warmer and his cheeks feel as if he’s glowing. A radiant thing, Erik does to him, and no one else has ever quite fused so well against his own molecules - let alone so explosively. He draws a breath and rests the back of his hand against his cheek to ease away the blush, and as the conversation continues, he turns back down the hall from whence he came.

_We’ll talk over chess._

He doesn’t need to hear Erik’s laugh to know he’s smiling.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The next cry makes him flinch, a howl of anger so loud between his ears that it sounds like feedback at a bad rock concert, but he follows its echoes to the source. His expression softens, and his brows lift. Charles licks his lips and edges into the nightmare he’s found ransacking the mind of Erik Lehnsherr._

It’s rare that Charles wakes at night. He’s always been a heavy sleeper, content to trust his mind to determine when to wake him and when not to bother. It’s rarer yet that he wakes and can’t get back to sleep.

The house is quiet outwardly, just the breathing of its sleeping occupants, the occasional strain on the wood that comes from the house’s age and nothing sinister. Inwardly, when Charles tentatively reaches to see, it is a volley of mangled words and mingling vowels, some images are clear and others chaotic. In short, it is a house of dreaming minds and bodies at rest.

_Charles!_

And awkward nighttime yearnings, apparently. Charles opens his eyes with a sigh and lays listening to the house again, brows furrowed.

It’s a gentle stretch, no more than the psychic equivalent of lifting his fingers from the bed. One more pass to ensure that whatever woke him is now settled, and perhaps ease his mind back to -

_Charles, no!_

He blinks, and his brows furrow. This isn’t the tone the first one seemed to be. He sits up a little just enough to rest on his elbow and press his fingers to his temple. Charles really does his damnedest not to pry into the minds of those close to him without their permission - easier though it would make everyone’s lives on some occasions, he recognizes that those close to him have a right to privacy and that his prodding is a violation of that. Not that he doesn’t peek once in a while, of course, and not that he won’t act against that tacit understanding if there’s a situation that calls for it.

Someone shouting out his name like that is certainly the latter.

The next cry makes him flinch, a howl of anger so loud between his ears that it sounds like feedback at a bad rock concert, but he follows its echoes to the source. His expression softens, and his brows lift. Charles licks his lips and edges into the nightmare he’s found ransacking the mind of Erik Lehnsherr.

The place is filthy, cold. Muddied smears of hoofprints and tyre tracks and boots in the mess in the middle of which Erik kneels, uncaring for the surroundings. His head is ducked, but he’s unharmed, back and shoulders curled in a familiar shape of exhaustion Charles has come to know fondly, with the man bent over their shared chess board, or with his arms folded at dinner, eyes up to consider Charles who always eats slower - and more - than he.

Charles takes a step nearer, his feet silent where they stand, leaving no tracks - he doesn’t belong in this dream, he can leave no marks within it. He watches Erik’s shoulders tense, and pauses despite himself. The man has always been astute, always aware when Charles was meddling, even if it was always in good fun.

With a jerk, Erik lets his arm shift and then settle, gentle, against something in his lap Charles can’t quite see over him where he stands. So he steps nearer.

“You weren’t supposed to be here,” Erik hisses, and Charles’ blood runs cold, panic, at being caught looking in on something so genuinely intimate, so entirely private as this. “Stupid, _stupid_ man, you were meant to let me handle this.”

Charles searches in every direction around him, turning to watch phantoms fade in human-shaped shadows against the billowing mist that surrounds all but Erik. Before them, many stories tall, a wrought iron fence with words that shift their letters formless in dream but are familiar enough in shape to drag a snarling shiver up Charles’ spine. He looks back down to the boy, no longer a man, at his feet when there’s a strangled sob.

He starts to reach for him but resists, as in a blink the boy - so little that Charles’ heart rends against itself - becomes the man he knows, again.

“I’m alright.”

Charles’ own voice, spoken by another of himself. He walks through the concrete-grey mud that, unsettlingly, does not actually unsettle beneath his feet. As he watches Erik hoist up the figure in his arms, who curses and laughs at all once, Charles feels himself suddenly sundered.

It’s one thing to project yourself into the mind of another and see the result.

It’s something else entirely to see yourself as another sees you.

This Charles looks younger, but not by much. He looks like the man who pulled Erik snarling and clawing from the ocean. Here, his hair is just as wet, plastered to his forehead before it is swept away by a muddy hand, leaving a smear across his pale skin. He looks a little ill, but not undone. There are scrapes against his skin, some Charles recognizes, ones he has had himself in the past that Erik would have noticed, remembered, others he has never sported, but seen here in such clear detail that it’s undeniable that Erik himself has.

His younger self grins up at the man holding him and turns his head a little, with a wince.

“I’m alright,” he says again.

“You’re a bloody mess,” Erik chastens him, drawing his hand through Charles’ hair once more, checking for damage along the hairline, relief easing his shoulders when he finds none. With a grunt, Erik settles further into the mud, on his hip, now, rather than his knees. “And a bloody idiot.”

“You’re starting to sound like me,” Charles laughs, for an instant before the endeavor snaps his teeth together and he hisses, nose wrinkled in a grimace of pain. Erik curses as he watches the stress ease from Charles’ features. It isn’t German in which he curses, but something close enough. Yiddish, most likely.

Charles who stands watching wonders if he should ask him to tell him about it, sometime.

He can’t begin to imagine how unpleasant the reaction will be.

“What hurts?” Erik asks, his accent thicker here, rolling low.

“Everything,” Charles shrugs in his lap, tilting closer against him until he’s laid sideways across Erik’s legs with his head against his arm. “Oh, Christ, that’s better.”

“Can you move?”

“Fingers,” Charles mutters, twitching them. “Toes,” he says, and the Charles watching can see the toes of his boots shift. “I think it’s a rib.”

Erik eases his position - to provide Charles more comfort, though it causes him to be seated twisted as he does - and hums displeasure.

“Ribs we can fix,” he mutters after a while, bending nearer. Behind him, Charles nearly trips over his own feet in his desire to see what’s going on as he circles the two before him - the two of them. But he finds - to his relief or dismay, he can’t quite tell - that Erik’s lips are firmly pressed together, though his forehead rests against Charles’ temple. He turns his head, once, again, like a nuzzle of a large cat, and hums again.

“You scared me,” he admits. Erik laughs, just once. “Don’t tell a goddamn soul, but you scared me. I would throttle you, if you hadn’t have marched in and done that to yourself.”

Charles watches as his other lifts a hand, and with muddy fingertips traces the line of Erik’s jaw. It’s so intimate that Charles wants to look away from himself but he can’t, a soft breath clouded misty grey drawn in as Erik draws the tip of his nose against Charles’ temple. Something has changed between them, whether explained in this dream or another, or a waking dream…

No. Not that. Charles can’t allow himself the distraction to imagine it.

“I thought I could help,” Charles laughs, sliding his arm around Erik’s neck not to be brought to his feet, but to keep Erik close.

“You always do. Your good intentions will see the lot of us killed.”

“Not this time,” murmurs Charles. “Think you can find enough metallic molecules in my bones to mend me up again?”

“I’ll use my own if I have to,” Erik reminds him, turning his face against Charles’ one more time, a lingering and long thing that pulls his eyelids down and his lips into a languid turn of a smile. Then Erik sits back, drawing one foot through the mud to balance himself better, before he sets a hand to Charles’ chest, hushing him when he makes a gentle sound of pain.

“Breathe in,” he suggests, other hand pressing to Charles’ cheek, thumb caressing beneath his eye. When Charles does, the Charles watching drops his fingers from his forehead and presses his hands to his eyes instead, allowing a shaking breath to leave him as he settles deeper into his own mattress, in his own bed, alone.

What would happen, if now - right now - Charles went to him? His chest aches as if he had infact broken a rib, a stabbing pain and swelling warmth gathering too quickly inside him. What would happen if he did? If he said nothing, explained nothing, but merely slipped into Erik’s bed and lay pressed behind him, an arm around his middle and warm breath pooling against the back of his neck. If he kissed him there, just a touch, to let Erik feel that he is alive, and whole.

That Charles is, too.

Charles sits up suddenly, throwing a hand out to smack on the light beside his bed. He’s delirious, addled and half-asleep. His cheeks are scarlet and hot enough that he picks up the glass of water from beside his bed to hold against them. It was only a dream, and much as Erik would claim to care for no one, he cares for many. Charles must simply be the first face that popped up to manifest in this particular nightmare.

Surely that’s it.

Surely it’s nothing more.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Charles appreciates, not for the first time even this week, that there aren’t any other telepaths on the grounds with them._

Charles finds that after the nightmare, he is more uneasy than Erik by far. It leads him to wonder, though he can imagine the answer, as to how often Erik is plagued by his memories with such visceral fear and anger. The more efficient question would be to ask how many nights he isn’t troubled by them. Charles imagines the number would be far fewer.

But Erik seems little worse for wear at breakfast the following morning, giving Charles a look only when he sees him watching. Charles pulls a face back at him and pretends to be occupied with his scone, smearing a bit with lemon curd and not saying a word. Not a word about how long he stood at the door of his own bedroom, fighting himself from opening it and going to him. Not a word about what he saw or what it means. Not a word, not a touch, not another look.

Until Erik excuses himself and goes.

Charles’ heart skids faster against his ribs. A foolish panic for no real reason that he can fathom, other than the lingering fear of another pressed against his own thoughts. Erik is safe here - they both are - and he seems as happy as he ever is, which is to say that he’s begrudging at best. On the outside, nothing is any different than the day before.

Inside, it’s hard for Charles to focus on his class when every part of him wants to imagine how it would feel to be held so close against him, nuzzled and scolded and -

He doesn’t finish the thought.

But he finishes his class and in doing so, provides himself an excuse to seek out Erik. Touching tripping across the minds of the house’s inhabitants, he finds Erik below, and Charles’ body grows flush with the strain of muscle he can feel from the other man. Charles lowers his fingers and clears his throat, knitting his brow at Banshee as the boy arches a brow at him.

“Off to class,” Charles tells him as he passes by, buttoning his jacket with his bag stowed under his arm.

“I don’t have a class.”

“Go do something useful then. Go study. Go fly. You can bloody well fly!” The professor laughs, turning to walk backwards for a few steps as Banshee regards him, bewildered. “That we don’t have to drag you down with nets is a surprise, really.”

Banshee grins, abashed, and ducking his head scuttles off. Charles watches him, a fondness blooming soft in his chest before he continues seeking out his other half.

No. No no. Wrong idiom.

His partner?

His associate. There. That’s safe.

Charles appreciates, not for the first time even this week, that there aren’t any other telepaths on the grounds with them.

Initially, the lower floors and basement of the estate house were used for nothing more than storage; Charles’ parents spent little enough time within the house itself to bother refurbishing floors only the staff went to on occasion. Now, the previously unused space hosts within itself a gym, some of the heavier tomes from the library upstairs, several insulated and isolated chambers for work with elemental “doers”, and a swimming pool.

Charles doesn't even pause as he continues down to the latter, the lowest floor, lit by bright lights behind matte screens to simulate windows and constant daylight so far below the ground. 

He hears Erik before he sees him, the constant and continuous hiss of skin against water as he propels his body through it, lap after lap. A quick scan confirms that Charles is, in fact, the only one down here with Erik, and with that he allows himself to look properly, to follow the tanned and long body as it slides through the water like a shark.

He does keep himself fit.

Good heavens, does he ever.

And it’s as much a relief just to see him hale and hearty as it is a pleasure to appreciate just _how_ hale he is. His shoulders emerge wide, water running glistening rivulets through the contours of muscles that push the water powerfully aside. His back curves upward and flares out, long legs kicking ferocious strides beneath the tumult of water he stirs. He is sleek and strong, capable of so much in both body and mind, and Charles feels himself sway a little with the scarcest comprehension of it all, as his heart seems to expand with every beat.

Erik pushes off the wall back to the other side of the pool, and as he goes to finish a last lap, Charles comes to the edge where he touched moments before. He crouches, then sits. The water laps against the tile as Charles unlaces his shoes and sets them aside. He rolls up his socks and puts one in each shoe, pushing them out of the way so he can cuff his pants. By the time Erik’s returned, Charles has his legs in the heated water, swinging them idly.

There is a gentle touch to the ball of Charles’ foot before Erik surfaces before him, very close, and brings a hand up to slide water from his face.

His eyes are only a little red-rimmed from the water. His chest rises and falls from the exertion, and he stretches his shoulders just once, presenting his chest forward, before relaxing again.

“Charles,” Erik purrs - goddamn _purrs_ \- before raising a brow. “Looking at starting a much needed morning exercise routine?” He ducks the splash aimed at him by Charles’ foot and grins. “Or did you stumble here on a morning stroll?”

“I walked without aid or need for it,” Charles replies, sniffing, haughty, and smiling when Erik snorts.

“I could make you stumble,” he notes, and without warning or explanation he sets both hands to the edge of the pool next to Charles and hoists himself from the water with a graceful push.

Charles wonders how Erik - through his electromagnetic control - has managed to move time itself. Time is not a magnetic field, but another force. Energy, yes, in some distanced sense, but for a moment, it seems to slow as when Charles forces psychic stillness to a scene. Did he do this, so that he could watch every droplet cascade down through the ginger hair that spreads coarse across Erik’s chest? Did he do it so that he could fully appreciate the effortless strain of his arms, muscles standing stark as he heaves himself from the pool? Did he do it, without meaning to, so that his attention could follow the rippling contours of muscle down Erik’s bare belly and note distinctly the trail of darkening hair that runs from his navel and disappears beneath sleek, black swim briefs?

Water crashes across the edge of the pool and the chill of it against Charles’ pants is enough to return time to its proper speed.

No, he didn’t do this. Time slowed naturally, and in doing, spread rapid a strawberry-bright blush beneath Charles’ eyes. He does not look at his friend beside him, not as he draws a foot up to the edge and hoists himself up to his feet. He does not peripherally note the bulge barely contained by his briefs - obscene, it’s positively obscene - nor the tight swells where his bottom meets his powerful thighs. He does, however, briskly clear his throat and force a furrow into his brows.

“I imagine you could,” Charles answers weakly, wishing like hell his voice hadn’t just cracked as he said it. “Do you do this every morning?”

He listens to every slap of wet feet against the tiles as Erik passes behind him and bends - though Charles refuses to turn and see - to get a towel. A moment of nothing but breathing, steady and even, before the footsteps return, to Charles’ other side, and Erik finally answers him.

“As many laps as I can manage, before the kids demand attention,” he says. The towel hangs over his shoulders, used to dry his hair and apparently very little else. Charles notes that his hip is cocked, and his cock is -

“And I thought you never wanted morning classes because you hated mornings,” he manages.

“Detest them,” Erik laughs. “Can never properly sleep in, like one should before the clock hits double digits.”

Charles smiles at this, head ducked as much to hide his blush as to keep his eyes from straying. “So swimming an Olympic-sized pool until you can't anymore is okay, but sitting in a classroom with tea…”

“Right out,” agrees Erik, amused, as he lifts his towel to his hair again and briskly dries it. “Why are you here, Charles?”

“It's my house. I can go where I like.”

“Like the pool, without desire to swim.”

“If I like,” Charles says again, glancing only as high as Erik’s knee before looking towards his own legs. He lifts his feet and watches the water cascade from them, slicking silver over pale shins. Nothing like Erik’s strength in them, of course.

“You've forgotten, haven't you.”

Charles looks up at him before he can stop himself, cheeks scalding anew even as he tries desperately to manifest a serious expression. “What?”

“You've forgotten why you came down here,” Erik snorts, and after a beat passes, Charles laughs brightly.

“Afraid so, old friend,” he grins, licking his lower lip into his mouth in a familiar little nervous gesture. “Gone entirely.”

Erik makes another pleased sound that melds into a soft groan as he arches his back and stretches, shameless. “Such a mind surely can’t store every tiny insignificant detail, on every tiny insignificant man in this house,” he allows, not turning back to Charles as he lets his voice echo a little in the cavernous space they share. “Mint’s meant to promote memory, isn’t it?”

“Sorry?”

“Mint,” Erik repeats, setting a hand to the door of one of the built in changing rooms as he tilts his head at his friend. “Tea. That will promote memory, no?”

Charles blinks at him, finds his lips parting on a smile before he laughs, helpless in the face of such strangely endearing care. “Rosemary, actually,” he corrects. “Rosemary is known to promote memory, and stimulate the parts of the brain that -”

“Dinner then,” Erik shrugs. “Rosemary potatoes, perhaps. By then you should remember. Or one would hope.” His eyes narrow in a grin, and he lets go of the door and lets it swing closed behind him. “Let me change, and I’ll join you upstairs for your bloody tea before lessons begin.”

“What will we talk about?” Charles asks, amused, pushing himself to stand and seeking for a towel.

“Whatever comes to that incredible mind of yours, I imagine,” Erik tells him from behind the door, and Charles finds that he is thankful that he has the freedom to fully imagine - blush and all - in incredible and very welcome detail, what is revealed beneath the swimming trunks that Erik tosses with a slap to the floor.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Charles snorts, and quickly clears his throat after, then feigns a cough to mask the blush rising slowly but surely to his cheeks. Just a little something stuck. None of the students take notice._
> 
> Do you really think this is appropriate over dinner?

Once bitten. 

Twice shy.

In theory…

Perhaps if Erik didn't want his mind read, he would shield it better. Perhaps if he wasn't such a shameless flirt this wouldn't be happening in the first place. Perhaps Charles just really needs a distraction during dinner.

It doesn't matter what the reasons are, only that once more the professor finds himself seeking with careful tendrils towards a familiar person 

It's risky to do in public, very risky to do in front of curious and ever-watchful students for whom Charles is meant to be an example. But Charles will be _damned_ if Erik isn't bringing this upon himself. Truly. With his damned swim briefs and his sultry tones and the late night chess games that last much longer than they would against anyone else, considering how good both players are. Erik is practically inviting him to do it, with a pointedly pensive gaze that he spares evenly between the window and Charles. He's bloody well signalling that he wants Charles to have a look - there, right there, in the way his brow lifts and his smile shows just a little in the narrowing of his eyes, nowhere else.

Tease.

As if the show he put on while swimming wasn't enough.

Charles waits until once more Erik's quiet bemusement falls towards him. He reaches up to scratch his temple, and lifts a questioning brow. A twitch in the corner of Erik's lips gives permission, and with his elbow against the arm of his chair, Charles rests his cheek against his hand and sweeps his fore and middle finger discreetly to his temple. He seems to be listening to Hank attempt reason with Banshee on some point of philosophy or another, as Banshee counters as devil's advocate in whatever way the wind blows.

Charles seems to be listening to them.

He settles instead to listen to Erik.

For a while, he hears nothing at all out of the ordinary. The cloudy wall is down, and the words of the boys and girls that entertain the entire room echo through Erik’s ears as though through a badly tuned radio. Charles licks his lips, and edges a little deeper, towards a humming thud of a heartbeat he assumes to be Erik’s.

And then the panting starts, just a soft thing, barely heard, as though someone is catching their breath on the other side of the door. Charles directs his eyes to it, though the door is open and he knows full well that no one is there.

 _That’s you_ , Erik’s voice purrs warm against him. _To begin, anyway. It should get much, much faster._

Charles clears his throat just softly. A crease pinches between his brows. He says something passive when he's asked something that ends in right, professor? and then refocuses on the curious sounds that overlay the dinner, heard to none but the two men who sit opposite each other at the heads of it.

_What are you playing at, Erik?_

_Something I think you'll want to see_ , he responds. _Something that I think will provide clarity to a question you may not even yet be aware you've asked._

_Tell me, then._

_Some things are better experienced than set into words._

This time, the little gasp is much closer, almost against Charles' ear. Only thanks to years of practice in being startled by disembodied voices does he sit unflinching, without even his heart missing a beat. Another hitch of breath, another, as he comes closer to the door that Erik shows him, and then suddenly there's a low, laughing groan.

Charles' low, laughing groan to be precise.

His gaze sharpens at Erik from across the table.

Charles knows that laugh, he knows that groan. Often enough he is pressing it against the smooth skin of some lovely thing that has her hand between his legs. The fact that Erik can recreate it in his mind so well, that he can pitch it just so, to have _Charles_ realize where his body is in relation to the depth of tone and resonance… it’s as worrying as it is arousing.

Erik closes his eyes and when they open again he’s gazing out the window, lips tilted just a little in amusement.

 _All in the anticipation, isn’t it, my friend?_ Erik asks him, setting his hands to the table before him, fingers slipping together, distracting in their elegance and strength. _The door, and your choice to open it and see, or stand here and listen? ___

__Charles snorts, and quickly clears his throat after, then feigns a cough to mask the blush rising slowly but surely to his cheeks. Just a little something stuck. None of the students take notice._ _

___Do you really think this is appropriate over dinner?_ _ _

__Erik glances back from the corner of his eye, without turning his head. His smile widens, just a twitch. _Leave, then, if you don’t want to see.__ _

___You’re showing it to me on purpose._ _ _

___You don’t know what it is._ _ _

___It’s obviously me in there. Me and - and someone. How do you even know what I sound like?_ _ _

__At this, Erik says nothing, but the door in his mind swings open. Charles has to press deeper, from surface-level thoughts to deeper ideation - the kind of daydream where walls are patterned perfectly, specific textures woven together into near tangibility. It is the depth of thought that takes focus, often built over repeat periods of time._ _

__This is a thought that Erik has returned to often, enough to have built it up to a fine detail of his own bedroom._ _

__Charles realizes only too late that he’s already stepped forward._ _

__Once bitten…_ _

__He’s not wrong that the sounds are his own, attached to another figment of Erik’s mind that represents a foil for Charles himself. Unlike the last time Charles saw his doppelganger, this one is his age, his height and build and with a similar style to his hair, though messy as it is, fanned over the pillow it’s hard to tell._ _

__Now there are no longer the sounds of other voices around them, they exist on a different plane to the one Charles is concentrating on. To others, he will look as though he’s found a focus in the middle ground, eyes glazed and body relaxed in a form of meditation. Within, his heart is hammering harder._ _

__In this vision, clear as any real scene, someone is pressed between Charles’ thighs, on their knees, shaggy hair spiking messy between Charles’ groping fingers. No shirt. No bra or strap. Nothing on but very familiar underwear, nothing between the thin skin and muscles shifting strong beneath with every motion against Charles._ _

__Beneath his own sounds of pleasure, Charles hears the unmistakable sound of a slurp, skin against skin._ _

__He bends his unoccupied fingers against his cheek, pressing the cool backs of them to his searing blush._ _

__The figure between his legs is unclear, far less detailed than the rest of the room. He tries to make out the details of figure, to see who in God’s name Erik’s imagining as doing - well, _that_ to him - and with a huffed breath he comes closer still. Circling the wide bed, ignoring his own wide smile and sheepish laugh against his hand as his imagined body arches toward the ceiling, Charles waits for his thighs to lower from where they squeeze in pleasure around the head between his legs._ _

__Given time to make a list of those that Erik might be so serenely imagining in such an inappropriate situation, Charles would not have put Erik himself on it._ _

__His thin lips bend flushed, smeared with spit, up the length of how he imagines Charles’ cock to look. He’s generous in his imagination of it, but Charles hardly has time to appreciate this before he’s watching Erik’s distinctive teeth scrape carefully along delicate foreskin. He gathers it between his lips, sucking firm, and again Charles arches in a tickled shiver. His cheeks are blotched and rosy, just as they are now at the dinner table._ _

__Charles lifts his eyes from the middle distance, but with no less intensity of focus, stares at Erik from across the table._ _

___Why?_ _ _

__Erik keeps his own gaze to the window still, one hand up against his face, now, drawing his forefinger over and over his top lip in an absent caress._ _

___I was curious_ , he admits, before the tip of a pink tongue peeks free and Erik sits forward in his seat again, eyes on Charles once more. _What would happen if you saw.__ _

__The crease of Charles’ brow betrays his confusion, still, bordering on hurt. He presses inward again, deeper, far inside, casting a wide net well beyond Erik’s sordid little game. And it’s more startling still when his net comes up empty._ _

__There is no malice in this. No mockery. Unless Erik’s learned to gird himself even more than he already could - and Charles wouldn’t put it past him - then this is genuine._ _

__To whatever end, it is genuine._ _

__Charles pulls back from his mind, from the table, setting his hands to it and pushing back his chair. He excuses himself with a mutter of apology from the rest of the students, and keeping his head ducked to hide his blush - arousal and embarrassment, surprise and suspicion darkening his cheeks - he leaves them to their dinner._ _


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I never thought you would get over your stubbornness,” Erik manages, a whisper, a tickle of air between their lips as Charles presses their foreheads together and tries to catch his breath. Beneath Erik’s eyes he can see the beginning of a sunset warmth, just lingering over his nose and against those cheekbones._
> 
> _He’s_ blushing _._

Charles doesn’t speak of what he saw again. Erik makes no mention of it, and - admirably, Charles thinks - behaves no differently afterward. He’s still churlish, dry humored, prone to flights of giddy aggression when the mood takes him. He’s still unexpectedly sensitive when he needs to be, and attentive to everyone around him, even when he seems to have little regard for anyone at all.

And he’s still too damned good at chess.

It doesn’t help that Charles, by contrast to what he can see in the stone-smooth expression before him, is distracted beyond reason. All the times that Erik interrupted his endeavors at the pub repeat themselves, with new understanding shining new light on his being a general irritant. All the times that Erik has made himself present in various states of undress, moments that Charles thought were at best a disdain for the idea of needing to cover himself for anyone and at worst consummate cockiness. He doesn’t discard that as a possibility, of course, but surely someone so astute could see the effect it had on Charles, whether Charles wanted it to or not.

Of course he could see.

He knows. He’s known for longer than Charles has.

They still take dinner as a group. They still have their classes and their staff meetings. They still have a nightcap and attempt to out-banter the other over chess. Erik still stands, with a deliberate stretch enough to pull the hem of his shirt up over his stomach, and goes to his room before they can leave the comfort of late evening and enter early morning.

Goddamn him.

Charles thought the attraction - yes, magnetic, one might say, even though Charles doesn’t think it particularly funny - would fade. Given a return to normalcy from such a shock, given time and space as they continued building up a home and school for people like them, he was certain that in due course, Erik would simply be Erik again. But when nothing changes, it’s therein that Charles finds his logical fallacy.

Erik has always been just Erik.

And Charles has always felt pulled to him.

So he waits, for the stalemate and the last swig of scotch, he waits for the stretch of firm stomach to be revealed to him, and he waits until Erik is on the stairs before Charles quickens his steps faster and stops beside him. He licks his lips apart as Erik slows and raises a brow at him. Charles’ cheeks are burning, but he leans in close, pressing his hands to the wall on either side of his friend so that Erik is forced to turn his back against it.

“You wanted to know what would happen,” he murmurs. “If I saw.”

Erik says nothing - he rarely needs to to make himself understood. And Charles can see the way the lines at the corners of his eyes deepen just a little, the way the bottom lids flicker, just once, and relax once more. A smile. Delight. Pleasure. Teasing, always that soft lingering underscore of teasing.

“And what will happen?” He asks quietly, his voice as low and warm as Charles’ was against him. He keeps his lips parted as a small curiosity, the top of his tongue pressing just behind his top teeth. It’s irrationally endearing. It’s goddamn ridiculous. And Charles leans in, convincing himself it’s to get that expression off of Erik’s face, convincing himself it’s just to get him to stop gloating and to fall back to earth, convincing himself that it’s not a kiss, it’s a chastening.

Lips meet lips at a clumsy tilt, teeth pressing awkwardly, noses bumping and smearing against each other until they settle. Charles’ hands still on either side of Erik, pressing fists into the wall, Erik’s hands at his sides, fingers spread as though to rise but never completing the motion.

“I never thought you would get over your stubbornness,” Erik manages, a whisper, a tickle of air between their lips as Charles presses their foreheads together and tries to catch his breath. Beneath Erik’s eyes he can see the beginning of a sunset warmth, just lingering over his nose and against those cheekbones.

He’s _blushing_.

Charles laughs, softly, feeling as ridiculous as a schoolboy snogging another in the hall where the teachers can’t see. “I never thought I’d see this,” he says, stroking Erik’s dusky blush with the backs of his fingers. His lips follow, held to the delicate skin beneath his eye, pulled taut over a high cheekbone. He kisses again, the deep creases that gather shadowy at the corner of Erik’s eye. His jaw, hewn from stone. His throat, where Charles finds Erik’s pulse speeding when he sets his lips against it.

Charles draws back and they share a sigh. Their brows furrow in tandem at what is - now undeniably - happening between them. No more excuses. No more denial or lying to themselves to maintain the status quo. They’ve both fought quiet wars, like the pensive shuffle of chess pieces that always amount to stalemate, and deserve this rest.

This time, when Charles leans up to kiss him, it is with certainty, and the length of his body pressed hard to Erik’s own.

Erik’s groan is low, deep, a rumbling beneath Erik’s skin that has his shivering and smiling against his friend. His fists relax and press to strong straight shoulders as Erik’s hand settle wide and hot against Charles’ waist.

The kiss deepens.

Their entire perception of the space around them disappears to nothing in particular, just darkness and the casual constant awareness of presences nearby. But no students are out so late. No threat knocks on the doors of their secure estate. Just them. Just here. _Finally_.

“Am I going to have to ache for another week before you take me to bed too?” Erik asks, laughing against his friend as he draws their noses together and brings one hand up to settle to the back of Charles’ head to hold him near.

“No,” Charles says, almost a little affronted, brow pinched and frowning slightly. “No, of course not.”

He licks his lips apart and suddenly grins, nose wrinkling.

“I couldn’t do that to myself,” he adds, laughing a little too loud before he snares Erik by the hand and pulls free of him, dragging him stumbling up the stairs.

“Ass,” Erik breathes, following him on quiet feet. He folds their fingers more tightly together and tugs Charles near again, just outside his door, to kiss him against the jamb.

“Terrible,” he whispers. “Teasing, impossible man.” Each word is punctuated with a kiss, Charles’ jaw framed by a warm palm. “You infuriate me, you know that?”

“Do I really?” Charles asks, keeping his voice low but entirely unwilling to relent in the swell of pleasure Erik’s accusation brings out of him. He arches forward, relishing the unrelenting wall of Erik’s body against his own. “Is it my devilish charm? My intellectual prowess? Perhaps my unmatched skill in - ”

“It’s that you’re a stubborn shit.”

Charles tilts his head one way and then the other, not at all unhappy with this. But before he can think of another smart remark, it’s Erik’s mouth against his throat. Drawing tender skin between his lips with a noisy suck, grazing his teeth across it, he melts Charles to shuddering, pinning him flush to the wall when Charles’ arms circle his neck.

“And you?” Charles accuses him, when Erik mouths up against his jaw and softly bites it.

“What about me,” Erik growls, his grin parting wide and almost feral as Charles laughs.

“Sod off,” snorts Charles. “I’m not here to stroke your ego. Something else, though…”

Another groan, deep like a growl within the taller man’s chest, and Erik presses nearer, enough to set his legs on either side of Charles’. When he leans back, still pressed chest to chest with his professor, brow lifted and lips already dark from their kisses and the taste of Charles’ skin, he arches his hips closer.

“It could use a stroking,” he agrees. “So could you, from what I can gather. Shall we see?”

“Such salaciousness, Mr. Lehnsherr,” Charles muses. “I only meant that - ”

“Enough,” Erik decides, his surliness entirely put up as a front and wholly welcomed by the professor he tugs behind him. Charles follows happily, happier than he thinks he’s been in a very long time. Certainly more than with any of the admittedly wonderful women who have shared his bedroom recently. More than with anyone, in any capacity, being it scowling at each other over chess or snogging in a hallway.

“If only you could see the things I’ve been imagining,” Charles muses, as he spun into his bedroom with a laugh, stumbling. He brings his fingers to the button of his shirt before remembering he’s got a jumper over the top, and he wriggles out of it over his head, pitching it carelessly to the floor.

Erik closes the door quietly, regarding Charles with curiosity. “You could show me. You have that ability, you know.”

“Or I could show you here,” Charles says, tongue against his teeth as he toes off his shoes and kicks them away, “and now.”

“Did my little display help to push some of that imagination forward?” Erik asks him, for the moment delighting in merely watching Charles before him, the way he twitches trying to free a sleeve, how carefully he works the buttons despite the now significant bulge in his pants. Tempting, lovely thing. “Or did you imagine it before? During the boring post-wooing with the hapless bar creatures?”

“Don’t insult me,” Charles scoffs, as a sock finally snaps loose and he staggers a bit, catching himself on the edge of the bed. Nevermind that Erik hasn’t moved from the door. Nevermind that Charles is shirtless, in his pants and trousers and a single sock by compare. “You’ll find - imminently, it seems - that I am an attentive lover in the utmost.”

“Keen insights, no doubt, into what works and what does not, specific to the person.”

“Absolutely.”

“An unusual sensitivity, one might say, to particular predilections.”

“You’re damn right,” Charles says, as he pulls his other sock off and lets it fall beside the bed.

“A mutant adaptation that allows you to read the mind of another whenever you like.”

Charles pauses, thumbs hooked in the waistband of his trousers, and squints. “Are you going to take your clothes off or what?”

Erik blinks.

“Or what?” He asks, grinning immediately when Charles gives him a dry look. He lifts a hand, instead, and slips loose the button and zipper before Charles can reach either on his clothes. He steps nearer, then, smiling wider when Charles laughs and presses a hand to his face, lifting his eyes to grace the man with an exasperated look. Without a word, but with a deep and put-upon sigh, Erik sinks to his knees before his professor, toes pressed to the floor and thighs spread to accommodate Charles’ feet between them.

“I hardly think clothes will hinder me in this,” he says, setting his hands decisively to Charles’ and working them away from his trousers so Erik can pull them down instead.

Charles lifts his hips, one at a time, and draws a quick breath as he’s bared. His cock slides free, bouncing upward towards his belly. Its scarlet head pokes from beneath the delicate, outstretched hood and Charles blushes riotously to look down and see Erik between his legs.

“See,” he manages. “I don’t need your ability. I can get it up just fine.”

Erik makes a sound then, something that leans towards a helpless thing, a wanting, _needing_ thing, and leans in to press a hot, wet kiss against Charles’ hip.

“Yes, you certainly can,” he murmurs, lifting his eyes and narrowing them when Charles’ breath hitches seeing him this way. He makes no comment in regard to how he has imagined Charles, to how it is to see him here before him now, naked and hard and beautiful. Erik teases another kiss against thin and sensitive skin and hums as he brushes his lips against the coarse hair at the base of Charles’ cock, and closes his eyes to breathe him in.

Charles’ eyes hood heavy in an instant, all his cocksure jesting and ribald teasing falling away weak beneath the power of something far more primal. His cock jerks upward as Erik’s deep breath pulls minutely against his skin. His fingers come to rest through Erik’s dark hair not to push or pull or move him, but only to give him grounding as he takes in the scent of Charles at his essence.

Rough lips contact suddenly the tender skin of his groin. Laying fierce claim, as Erik did against Charles’ pale throat that will surely show marks tomorrow, he sucks and nibbles, his groan reverberating up to the tightly-clenched pit of Charles’ belly. Another kiss, against bushy pubic hair, coarse curls pressed flat by Erik’s insistent mouth and needy nuzzles. Another, against the root of Charles’ cock, and this is finally what pulls his eyes fluttering closed.

“Haven’t been with another boy since public school,” mutters Charles.

Erik pulls back with a sigh, breath gusting harsh against Charles’ prick. “I’m hardly a boy.”

“You’re a shit,” Charles tells him fondly, tugging his hair enough that Erik moans with it, eyes fluttering closed and lips parting to show his clenched teeth. He is stunning like this. Welcome and entirely unexpected like this. Experimentally, Charles tugs his hair a little harder, and Erik opens his eyes to regard him.

They’re pupil-dark and narrowed in feral pleasure.

“Do you still remember his name?”

“Whose?”

“The boy,” Erik answers, grinning. Charles snorts.

“There was more than one boy,” he clarifies, and with that Erik hums and leans near again, against the tug to his hair, to press his lips in a hot kiss against the head of Charles’ cock, tongue spreading thick and hot over it when he pulls back.

“For you too, apparently.” Charles’ laugh is an unsteady thing when already his blood quickens so swiftly as to dizzy him. He licks his bottom lip between his teeth and bares down gently on it, grunting quiet pleasure when - with a devious smile held in his eyes - Erik kisses the tip of his prick again. Charles lets go of his hair, instead bringing his hands to settle on Erik’s cheeks. The sinews of his wide jaw tense beneath his fingertips as Erik bows his head and takes him deeper.

Charles doesn't just moan this time. He laughs.

“God,” he sighs, features tensing with pleasure as Erik’s lips circle slick against his shaft, drawing away with a hollow-cheeked suck before pressing down again. “I've been a fool.”

Erik’s eyes alight at this, amusement glittering in the corona haze of pale blue that haloes his pupils.

“Hush,” grins Charles, before he bends low to span his hands down Erik’s shoulders and revel in the pulsing pressure and wet heat of his talented mouth. Of course it is. Of course Erik’s as skilled at this as everything else he does.

He is also patient. Slow. Deliberate. Every motion is felt of his flicking tongue. Every shift of his body, every puff of breath against Charles’ skin…

With a groan, Charles drags dull nails against Erik's still-clothed back and straightens. He sets a hand to the back of his head to feel him bob back and forth, taking Charles to the root and slipping back to tease just the head again.

And then the teeth, just like in the fantasy Charles had been a willing voyeur in, and the professor moans, trembling where he sits. He lets his head loll back, and then quickly ducks it forward again. He forces his eyes open to watch the shadows pool in the hollows of Erik’s cheeks when he sucks with such intensity that he seems to draw the breath itself out of Charles.

“S-Stop,” Charles whispers, firming his hand where it cups Erik’s jaw. He guides him back, expression contorted in ecstatic pleasure as Erik sucks him all the way off, and lets Charles’ cock pop free. Always restrained - more so now than Charles wishes he was - Erik lifts a brow and runs his thumb across his bottom lip to dry it.

Charles sighs, hopelessly fond.

“You still have all your clothes on,” he says, pushing back onto the bed and fighting down a grin as Erik pursues, hands on either side of him, knees to the mattress. Charles manifests a very serious expression indeed. “I’ve already seen nearly all of you, thanks to those little pants you swim in. Don’t tell me you’re suddenly shy.”

“Suddenly?” Erik asks, leaning forward over his friend to rub his cheek against Charles’ hair. “I’ve always been demure.”

“Sod off.”

“Very restrained and polite and entirely not out of order.”

“Take your goddamn clothes off, Erik,” Charles snorts, sitting back to disallow for more contact until the other does as he's told. There is such a thrill to knowing that were Charles to slip his mind into the mind before him, he would be allowed in, unhindered, to explore and command as he sees fit, and yet his words, and nothing more, are what have Erik sitting back on his heels and twisting out of his sweater.

Then his shirt, just two buttons undone to have it loose enough to slip free. Then the thin undershirt beneath…

Charles isn’t proud of the sound he makes. He’d never admit to it, and it would be Erik’s word against his if Erik ever brings it up again. A weak, wavering little _oh_ as Erik’s flat stomach is revealed, firm muscles flexing under a layer of softness as he lifts his shirt up over his head. Chest swathed in coarse copper curls. Dark nipples already pebbled stiff. Shoulders so strong that Charles is sure he could hang his entire weight from them and Erik would be unwavering.

It isn’t as if he’s not seen him nearly nude already. It isn’t as if he didn’t memorize, remember, fantasize over for far too long the sight of Erik’s chest. It’s that Erik bares it now not for exercise or showing off or whatever dreadful reason.

It’s that Erik bares himself for Charles.

“I think the swim routine is working for you,” Charles murmurs dryly, as he rubs a hand against his blushing cheek.

“You think so?” Erik arches his back a little and pushes higher on his knees, reaching for his belt to work that free next. “I suppose someone should enjoy the results.”

Charles swallows down his commentary as he watches the belt pulled free and long, considered, and tossed to the floor with a clatter of the buckle. Erik tilts his head, delighting at the response, and works free the buttons and fly on his trousers next.

“Don't think less of me,” he starts, watching Charles’ eyes widen, prepared, it seems, to justify anything Erik is about to say. “But certain days grew unbearable in waiting for you.” He slips his hand into his trousers and strokes, with a low deliberate groan of pleasure. And then, with an arch, a tightening of muscles, a sigh to relax them, Erik works the waistband down past his hips and to his thighs.

His hand curves practiced against his cock, no other fabric to hinder him in touching as he strokes languidly and watches the man before him on the bed.

“You'll destroy my sartorial tastes, peeling clothes from me before I’ve even made it to bed with you,” Erik clicks his tongue, lips pulling wide in a grin.

Charles’ brow pinches in the middle. His lips purse, then part, then purse again as though troubled. Erik’s cock stands proud and rigid, regal in its slight curve and thick. Good God, it's thick, dark-veined and scarlet-headed. And _long_. He frowns at Erik’s manipulation of himself and does not look away, until a slow stroke pulls a shiver up his own spine and he shakes his head as if to break the spell.

“Why are you…”

Nope. Lost it again.

Erik’s toothy grin flashes wide, almost a snarl if not for the deep creases of mirth that fan beside his eyes. “Why am I? There's a loaded question.”

“No, I meant - why are you on the floor still,” Charles says, then licks his lips and asks his real question. “Christ, Erik. Where do you _put_ it all?”

Erik’s laugh is loud, brash, and entirely genuine. For a moment he does nothing more than watch Charles watching him, before he snorts and bends to unlace his shoes and remove his clothes properly. There’s little need for grace here, both know they’ve already impressed the other in ways that are far more important and interesting than being able to undress without getting a sock caught on their heel.

“I keep it where it lays,” Erik says, setting his hands to his hips when he stands again, brow raised. His cock leans a little to the left when hard and Charles can’t take his eyes off of it.

He blinks, jerking in surprise, when Erik clicks his fingers and grins at him. “You’re more than welcome to touch it,” he points out. “Staring is rude.”

“What you've got there - that's what's bloody rude,” Charles declares, laughing wide-eyed. “Not sure how I'm meant not to stare when it occupies my entire field of vision.”

Erik rolls his eyes, though not with lack of amusement. He takes a step closer, brow raised.

“I mean - honestly, Erik, being entirely honest… should I be honest?”

“Are you ever anything less,” Erik wonders, another step bringing him to the edge of the bed. “Especially when tact might serve you well.”

Charles resists a joke about serving something well, and pulls his legs up onto the bed. Turning to his knees, lowering to his hands, he ducks his head and sighs close to Erik’s prick, breathing him in as he lifts only his eyes.

“Honestly,” he says again, “if you were trying to seduce me, you could have just slapped this down on the table. No one in their right mind would say no.”

Erik hums, dropping a hand to cup Charles’ jaw as he rubs the soft pad of his thumb over and over his lips. “Well, you see, therein lies the dilemma, my friend. I did not want _no one_ , nor did I want _anyone_. I know exactly who I want.”

He slips his fingers higher into Charles’ hair and strokes there next, gently flexing his nails down against the other’s scalp. “So what good would that have done me, hmm? Revealing myself in such a way and beating back a rush of unwanted attention?” With a click of his tongue, a brief drawing of his brow, Erik clenches his hand in the soft hair between his fingers and draws back a whining and complaining Charles from putting his lips on him.

“Or is that something you enjoy, terrible tempting man that you are? Competition?”

“God, no,” he snorts, moving as Erik moves him, with happy lack of resistance. He brushes his lips across a pointed hip when near enough, and lifts a hooded gaze when Erik tugs him gently away again. “I want to be the only man in the room getting attention. All eyes on me. I'm not good at sharing, really. All those kill or be killed years at public school. And wouldn't you know, just now, I think I've discovered an inclination towards monogamy that wasn't there before.”

Erik almost laughs. Almost. His chest swells a little and he fights down a smile. It's damned close, and Charles delights in this minor victory.

“Not only because of that, of course. Although it doesn't hurt,” he adds, laughing loud when Erik gives him a bit of a shove. Charles holds him by the waist. “I agree with you! I'm agreeing! No one but me should ever know about this.”

He leans close, and draws a languid, hot kiss against the stark vein that runs from Erik’s hip to his pubic hair.

Erik’s breath hitches, just enough to notice. He sighs it free with a hum and tilts his head to look at Charles bent over for him.

“Possessive ass,” he murmurs fondly, turning his hips just enough that his cock strokes against Charles’ cheek. “I think I’m quote fond of you like this.”

Charles snorts and sucks a mark against Erik's skin, before enveloping his lips around the base of his cock, thick and hot, the wiry hair tickling his nose. Erik groans his clear appreciation.

“Beautiful,” he whispers, watching Charles acquaint himself with something Erik is sure the man will challenge himself to learn by heart. He’s already on it, seemingly, that magnificent mind focused sharp on following the solid ridge of Erik’s erection with open-mouthed kisses, each one held long and joined with the press of his tongue. He marks a path along dark, delicate skin, nosing against the shaft until he can trace with the tip of his tongue one of the veins that runs along its length.

Erik’s breath leaves him a huff when, for a moment, Charles relents to savor the musky, pleasant taste on his tongue. He licks his bottom lip into his mouth and wraps a hand around the solid shaft standing stiff before him. A slow stroke squeezes upward and twists gently around the head, thumb pressing the bridge of skin beneath as he curls his wrist and presses back down. Lazy strokes, unhurried. Mischief in his eyes as they alight to Erik, held for an instant before they flutter closed and he bows his head to take Erik properly into his mouth.

It’s been a long time, admittedly, since Charles has done this. In school, at university, it was a common enough way to have one off when they couldn’t pull girls, and Charles always found it to be far from distasteful. And with Erik grunting softly above him, stomach flattening as Charles sucks him down as far as he can go, Charles wonders why he hasn’t pursued this particular option more fervently.

Waiting for the right man, maybe.

Charles’ eyes narrow in delight at the thought. He lets go of Erik’s prick to instead grasp him by the hips, thumbs stroking along their hollows and fingers pressed firm. He curves his tongue to funnel Erik’s cock back into his mouth, girthy enough that his jaw already twinges a bit. He’s out of practice, that’s all. And Christ almighty, is Charles ever thrilled at the prospect of righting that wrong.

“God, you keep doing that and...” Erik sucks a sharp breath between his teeth and drops his head back, lips parted on soft sounds. A moment, another, and Erik's voice carries a little louder towards the ceiling.

Charles shivers in delight.

Hands, large and rough yet strangely gentle, tug through Charles’ curls, messing them up further to a nest atop his head. Then down Charles’ back, forefinger and middle finger pressing to his spine until Charles arches his back and groans around the girth within his mouth. 

“Charles.”

He gives a hum, but attempts no other answer.

“Charles, I’d planned to make quite a mess of your sheets the first time you fuck me,” Erik grunts. “If you don't stop, I…”

“You’ll make a mess of me?” Charles adds helpfully, when he’s slid his mouth free of Erik’s cock. His lips are flushed, swollen a bit. He wipes away his spit with the back of his hand and gives his friend a stroke, grinning crooked up at him. He squints. “Did you just say you want me to fuck you?”

“Is that unacceptable to you?”

“Unacceptable! No,” he says, reluctantly letting Erik’s cock slide free of his grasp, watching as it bobs rigid and red before him. Charles pushes back onto the bed, his own prick lolling eager against his belly as he works himself up and over to his bedside table, turning to his belly to root around in the drawer. “No, what’s unacceptable is that - despite my, you know,” Charles says, wiggling his fingers beside his temple. “You’ve still managed to hide all this from me, and for so long.”

“Who said I’d been thinking about it for long?” Erik counters, as he kneels to the bed and crawls closer to his friend. “Perhaps the thought only occurred to me several days before.”

Charles looks back over his shoulder, lubricant triumphantly in hand, and he gives Erik a entirely feigned look of extraordinary hurt. “Don’t lie to me in my own bed, Erik.”

“I wouldn't dream of it,” Erik replies, amused, and ducks his head to kiss hot against the skin at the small of Charles’ back, eyes up to his. Charles’ hips lift a little, like a cat responding to a soft stroke down their spine, and his smile spreads wide enough to wrinkle his nose. “Doors are wonderful things to think of, if nothing else. You're far too much of a gentleman to open someone's mind that is not opened to you first.”

“That is, tragically, true,” Charles sighs, turning fully to lay back into the pillows again, and finding his lips caught by Erik's before he can say more.

He can taste himself still, earthy and only a little bitter, against Erik's tongue.

Charles lets the bottle slip from his fingers to the bed, nestled against his side, in favor of spanning his hands against Erik’s cheeks. He parts his legs for Erik to lay between, moaning softly amidst the gentle clicks of their kisses and the low hums when their tongues touch between their mouths. Charles smiles, irrepressible in his pleasure and just as much his amusement in sharing it with Erik. He learns the bend of his lips and their movement, matching it with his own and turning against it to twist softly together. He is the first to let the motion carry him. As their kisses ebb and flow, deep and slow, Charles lifts a leg and presses a heel to the bed, letting their hips rock together as their mouths part sighing.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me what you like,” Charles murmurs, running his hands through Erik’s hair and folding his fingers together at the back of his neck. He presses their brows together and with another upward thrust, kisses him roughly. “I’m not going to go poking around for it. I want to hear you tell me.”

“I wouldn't let you in,” Erik agrees. “You, Charles Xavier, are going to learn me properly. Like the rest of us poor sods have to.”

He parts his lips and denies Charles another kiss with a grin, still pressed near and rocking their bodies together with deliberate precision. Erik allows himself to be held, but he doesn't hold. His hands remain planted to the bed to keep them both balanced. He takes his touch with rough nuzzles and sloppy kisses, the rutting of his prick against the curve of Charles’ thigh.

“Fingers,” he says at last, voice a low rumble. “Two to start.”

Charles sighs roughly, rocking harder up against Erik and dragging a sucking kiss beneath his jaw. The man damn near purrs from it, and without even seeing his expression - with Charles’ own eyes or his mind’s eye - he knows he’s smiling feline and pleased. Charles drops his hands to Erik’s shoulders, and turns them across the bed. Erik produces the lubricant from under his back and Charles quickly slicks his fingers, nearly spilling the whole thing in his enthusiasm.

“Two to start,” Charles asks, intrigued.

“To start,” Erik repeats, holding up his fingers as he spreads his legs with a rumbling sigh. “Two.”

Charles laughs, a naughty little sound, as he brings his dry hand forward to support himself over the remarkable man beneath him. Christ, he’s handsome, and there’s a relief in being able to appreciate it now as Charles truly feels it - deep down in the pit of his belly - rather than obliquely, as if Erik were a sculpture at the Met to be admired for conformation and skill in construction. Charles rubs the length of his body against him, overcome by the strength inside and out that he knows his old friend carries not without effort.

“You’re stunning,” Charles tells him, in what sounds like a line, but he means entirely, slipping his fingers between Erik’s legs.

Erik's lips immediately slip back in a snarl of pleasure, sinews pulling stark at his throat and down to his chest. He makes a sound, a low purr of pleasure, and blinks his eyes open.

He's imagined Charles this way, perhaps as often as he has imagined himself between Charles’ legs, deliberately and carefully taking him apart with his mouth. Spry and small as he is, awkward as many of his attempts are to coax unsuspecting yet entirely lucky women to his bed, Charles is entirely extraordinary. 

Large hands find Charles’ arms and slide up them to his shoulders, pulling him down and nearer as the professor spreads his fingers and curves them, seeking. With a curse, Erik arches his neck to kiss him. Charles turns just a little so that Erik kisses his cheek, though with no less ferocity, his smile widening to a snorted laugh. He moves his fingers slowly, more carefully than he probably needs, but there’s no need to rush and so he’s gentle as he works them deeper, in and out, knuckle by knuckle until he’s buried flush.

A stiff shudder snaps taut through Erik’s body and Charles catches his moan in a kiss, curving his fingers upward to rub and stoke Erik hotter still. The thought that such a man would so happily give himself to this - that Charles will be able to (he hopes, God, he hopes) bring him trembling pleasure - is a feeling unlike any that Charles has had towards someone sharing his bed. But this isn’t just ‘someone’, as Erik said. This isn’t just ‘anyone.’

It’s his dear friend, who all this time has been harboring secret and illicit desires.

How terribly thrilling.

Erik drops one hand to stroke himself, beads of clear slick dripping to his stomach as he holds himself tense with pleasure. His eyes close, lips parting, and he arches his neck, completely vulnerable and open, for Charles to explore as he will.

“Another,” he grunts, teeth catching his bottom lip and pressing it out of shape. “Add another.”

How fortunate that Charles slicked his fingers up in excess. A man who starts with two is likely to want more, after all, though Charles will hardly be able to satisfy in the same way that Erik could, being reasonably endowed rather than extraordinarily so. No matter. He’ll make up for it in skill, however long it’s been since he’s had any practice, and in the genuine and reverent attention he pays to slowly twisting a third finger into the man, while mouthing against his speeding pulse.

Erik grunts again, through bared teeth, and turns his head aside. Charles wraps his lips against the man’s throat and suckles in time with the stroke of his fingertips, circling and spreading, stretching muscle and probing pleasure. His tongue traces up to Erik’s jaw, kisses follow the hard bone, and he forces his head back with a kiss against his lips, held long.

When they part, Charles laughs, just a little. A single note of disbelief, released amidst his expression of exquisite delight. “Is it alright, darling?”

Charles blinks.

He licks his lips apart as Erik’s writhing slows a little and a brow lifts.

“Habit,” Charles explains, and he kisses Erik again before he can reply.

The other snares a hand in his hair to hold him close as they kiss, a briefly rough thing, possessive, before it unfolds to lazy exploration once more.

“Feels fucking glorious,” Erik purrs after a while, clenching around Charles’ fingers with a groan. “Better than the clumsy fumbling of my own hand.”

He raises a brow when Charles blinks at him, and feigns confusion. “I would never lie to you in your own bed,” Erik reminds him. “Darling.”

Charles laughs low, shaking his head at Erik as he slides his fingers free. The man’s teeth bare in a low little growl and Charles shivers at the sight of him. All those teeth, that Charles wants to feel nip every inch of his body. That ferocity, even still, to claim what he wants and have what he thinks he deserves.

It’s intoxicating to think that what he wants, and thinks he deserves, is Charles Xavier.

“Easy now, old friend,” he tells him, with a teasingly patronizing pat against his stomach. He hardly completes the motion, fingers splaying over flat muscle and soft skin, nails drawing down coarse hair. Charles can’t help himself, that low already, and runs his palm down to Erik’s cock, lifting it in a gentle tug and letting it fall back to his belly.

He shivers at the sight of it, and reaches to grease his hand up again, tugging his own prick with far less reverence to get it wet.

“Sit back,” Erik tells him, bringing one hand up to rest behind his head. “Let me see.”

Charles laughs, brows raised. “See what?”

Erik lifts a brow and draws up a knee, opening himself further for Charles to look his fill.

“You stroking your prick before you fuck me,” he elaborates, words delivered crisply and with great precision. Something so filthy said as though inquiring about the goddamn weather. An instruction given with the same borderline impatience that underlies damn near everything Erik says.

Charles, the gleeful little exhibitionist, spreads his knees wide and sits on his heels. He lubes his hand again, and fists it smoothly down his stiff prick. He needn’t fake the sounds he makes, when each soft note emerges entirely genuine. He needn’t put on a show, because even just in his slow and steady stroking - cockhead appearing atop his fist, then disappearing within again - Erik’s eyes hood heavy and his lips part. Charles quirks a brow and brings just his thumb and forefinger together, gathering up his foreskin to squeeze to a gathered wrinkle at the tip and push out a bead of precome. Erik hasn’t got one, but watches rapt as Charles slides the delicate, velvety skin back down again, all the past the corona, to let the flushed, purpling head emerge entirely.

“Staring’s rude, Erik,” he says with a grin.

Erik groans, long and low, letting his eyes close as he arches from the bed in a slow, deep stretch.

“Come here then,” he says, a put-upon air as though Charles had insisted on showing off, legs spread and cock stroked hard. Erik reaches with his free hand and slips it into Charles’ hair when he's near enough. Forehead to forehead they nuzzle, a predatory creature and a clever sly one.

“Now,” Erik sighs. “I would appreciate it greatly if you would bugger me breathless.”

With a surprised, low laugh, Charles murmurs, “You’re a naughty one, aren’t you.”

He pushes his prick down and guides it forward as he adjusts himself over Erik. Keeping his hand around the base of his shaft, the other arm supporting him, he holds Erik’s lips trapped against his own as a slow rock forward pushes the head of his cock against Erik’s opening. Only when he begins to breach does he relent in his kiss, but not in their closeness. Brows touching, nuzzling alongside the other’s nose, Charles speaks to him softly - this too, a habit, but one for which he won’t apologize.

“Easy now,” he sighs, as another restrained thrust brings him a little deeper, and tightens Erik’s fingers in his hair. Charles tilts his head when Erik pulls, kissing the corner of his mouth. “Relax. We’re not going to rush anything. Unless you want me to, anyway, but - God,” he exclaims with a soft shudder as Erik’s ring of tight muscle snares him firm. “Slow now. Christ, you feel extraordinary.”

Erik laughs, that low bark of a sound that rings against his bones. His lips part to speak, but his throat clicks, the only sound he can manage as Charles pushes deeper still on another languid rock.

“I don't think I’m going to let you out of bed,” Erik admits, brows furrowing as Charles settles in to the hilt, thick and hot inside him. “Not tonight, nor tomorrow either.”

“We have class,” Charles whispers, nose wrinkling when he grins, with all the naughtiness of a schoolboy rather than an acclaimed professor. His hips snap just lightly, to dig a little deeper to the consuming, delicious pressure that surrounds him hot and slick. “You want to make me a truant.”

“I want you to fuck me,” Erik rumbles, and Charles is devoured by a kiss.

He reaches back to fold Erik’s leg over his hip, to thrust at the right angle in which their bodies so perfectly - and unexpectedly - fit. They move together in unison, less a fucking than a steady rocking, their bodies synced in tandem and the mouths tangled hot. Charles won’t tell him - it would be a disappointment, he imagines - but he never really imagined this, not with any devotion or clarity, and certainly not the likes of which Erik envisioned it. It seemed too far-fetched, and Charles has his feet too firmly planted on the ground.

He looked.

He appreciated.

His mind wandered now and again, but it was an impossibility, and rather than become so ensconced in the idea of it to the point that it affected their friendship, Charles forced his thoughts away.

He never imagined this would happen.

And even if he had, he couldn’t possibly have fathomed how good it feels.

Their pace speeds, when neither can hold back from letting it. Erik's hands travel over every part of Charles he can reach; over his shoulders and down his sides, tickling a little against his ribs before framing his hips and slipping lower still, to cup Charles’ ass and squeeze.

With a laugh, he presses their lips together and moans, deep and loud, for Charles to enjoy.

All those evenings of fantasies, spurred on initially by terrifying dreams of losing Charles entirely, and nothing could come close to this. There have been nights when Erik had passed Charles’ room only to hear that deep groan of pleasure, the shifting of sheets and panted breaths. He listened, he committed the sounds to memory, and he had gone on his way.

It was only when they had started invading his thoughts that Erik had given the idea serious consideration. 

Surely there was more to his genuine displeasure in seeing Charles pick up women at bars than the want for his friend to retain his integrity? Surely there was a reason he spent hours over a chessboard instead of attempting an early night. 

He had established this entire school with the man, for God's sake.

So perhaps this - their shared breath and wet kisses, whimpered pleasure and sweaty skin - was inevitable from the beginning.

And who’s to say they can’t, or shouldn’t? The government? Churches? Bodies of false power that hold no control over the ones they possess, over the one that fills Erik and the one that Charles fills now with laughter breaking apart their kisses, only to be pulled back together again. Erik has no mind for the laws of man, especially moralities that would dictate that what they do now is wrong.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Erik grasps Charles by the shoulders. The professor’s eyes fly wide as he’s snared by a leg and turned to his back. Atop him, Erik unfurls like a cat stretching into the sun, hands on Charles’ chest and thighs spread wide across his hips. Charles lays his hands on Erik’s hips, but only rests them there. His eyes hood heavy, as Erik’s cock bobs stiff and past it, he can see his own prick disappearing in slow inches into the heat that spreads like magma beneath his own skin.

Erik asks, with a rough laugh, “Is it alright, darling?”

Charles licks his lips apart just as Erik sinks again, and his expression tenses into pleasure. “This is - this is just fine,” he assures him, laughing and moaning all at once.

“Good.”

Erik keeps himself restrained, despite the tension that thrums through his body. He keeps the pace slow, deliberate slides down and careful pushes back up, again and again. He keeps his eyes on Charles beneath him. How often has he imagined this? How often have both of them? Charles runs his hands in fond adoration down to Erik’s clenching thighs, thumbs stroking through coarse hair, up over his friend’s belly that ripples tight with every rise and fall as he impales himself languidly on Charles’ cock. Erik’s head tilts back as he turns his hips, a rough grunt pushed through his teeth.

Charles spans his hands down again to take Erik’s prick in both of them, stroking him in firm pulls and watching as pleasure makes lax the tension of Erik’s jaw. From the slit, a clear bead forms and drips, a thread joining it to his belly. Charles imagines for a moment how it would feel for Erik to sit astride him, fuck himself into Charles’ fists, and come all across his chest.

And the thought, welcome as it is, is enough that Charles can’t stand the teasing anymore.

Erik is pushed back to his back and Charles buries himself deep, skin clapping against skin as he drives a moan from his friend. Faster, harder, holding his hand against Erik’s jaw to turn his head aside and suck a kiss against his throat. He leaves a mark and claims his mouth just the same, kissing furiously as he fucks his friend into the mattress and the jilted moans that infuse his own voice pitch higher and higher.

Erik welcomes the pressure, the speed, the sheer hardness of Charles above him, settling his hands to his shoulders, then down his back, then to his ass again to urge him deeper, legs spread wide and toes pressed white against the bed.

“I’m going to feel this for days,” Erik points out, fingers working to gently spread Charles as he arches up on a particularly deep thrust. “Every time I sit, walk, teach…”

“Wouldn't want you forgetting,” Charles tells him, lips parting on a moan and a grin both as Erik’s fingers find the sensitive hot skin between his legs and rub. It’s excruciatingly good.

“How could I possibly fucking forget?” Erik pants against him, arching his head back and moaning as Charles finds that place within him that sends shivers and sparks and pleasure spiking through him like a gunshot. “How could I possibly - with you there, just - _there_ \- fuck -”

Charles’ brow furrows hard, but his smile doesn’t waver. Neither his laugh, even when it’s squeezed to moaning quiet against Erik’s fevered brow. Neither the tripping speeding stumbling of his heart and he feels Erik’s body snap tense and loosen, spilling warm jets of release between their bellies.

Charles grips him to bring him close, arms under his, hands folded up over his shoulders. Rocking hard against him, hips and stomach and chest and mouth, Charles drives against that particular spot that brings Erik to swearing again and again, through his orgasm, through his own, crying out softly against his friend’s mouth as it takes him, closing their kiss again with a hiss of breath pushed against Erik’s cheek as their mouths twist together. He buries himself deep. His toes slip out from behind him. He lays heavy against him and parts their kiss again with a low moan, tucking his face against Erik’s neck as he settles heavily atop him.

“All those nights I might have just gone to bed with you instead,” Charles bemoans, with a dizzied laugh.

Erik snorts, taking his time to stretch feeling back into his numb and tingling fingers before slipping one hand into Charles’ hair.

“All those nights I tried to get you to,” he laments back, turning his cheek against mahogany curls as his hand slips down Charles’ spine instead. “Stubborn ass.”

“If this is what amounts to pillow talk for you, you can be on your way,” Charles responds, brows lifted. Erik shrugs, and makes as if to slide out from under him, but Charles only laughs ruefully against his throat and lays heavier still. “No, no. We’ll work on it.”

“Will we.”

“Yes. For instance, I’ll say, ‘Mr. Lehnsherr, thank you for confessing your insurmountable, undeniable attraction to me, and for sharing my bed this evening. You make extraordinary sounds and I look forward to finding many new and interesting ways so that we both might enjoy them again’,” Charles says, grinning down at his friend from under his mop of hair. “And you say…”

Erik considers and clears his throat, brows furrowing as he thinks. “‘Doctor Xavier,’” he recites. “‘Thank you for a very thorough shagging. I’ll be certain to return the favor when I can feel my toes again, and do so well enough that pillow talk may not matter by the morning.’”

He grins at Charles and accepts the kiss pressed to his tingling lips. “We can work on it,” he agrees. But for now, he doesn’t want to move. He doesn’t want to talk or do anything at all but touch and be touched, recover, and show Charles he was far from joking in his suggestion.

They have all night to make up for the evenings lost. And more evenings hence to keep newly made promises.


End file.
